Shmuley Myers – Sol Sharp

On Unintended Consequences and Proofs Thereof

Sol Sharp on 9 May, 2023

I debated, both internally and with friends, about whether to write this. As someone who doomscrolls on this subject in this “alternate reality” America, each article on the progress of creating the reality of the Shmuley Myers universe is depressing. But, also, uplifting, given the strength of politics as regards to bodily agency.

We’re creeping, sometimes leaping, to the point where the Preborn Investigation Bureau is a state, if not federal, necessity. After all, if “personhood” starts at conception, then civil law suits as a trigger or response don’t make sense. One doesn’t use civil suits, for example, as the primary means of handling assault and battery, right?

The abortion issue aside, fetal personhood requires intrusion into personal lives that makes England’s forced boarding of soldiers as a Revolutionary War trigger look trivial. Just as the police patrol for lawbreakers, sewers and toilets would need to be surveilled to look for pregnancies or abortion signs.

However, that’s just the start.

There would need to exist, even on a state-level “personhood” concept, an equivalent of the NCIC, to track people when they’re pregnant, and their “crimes” of abortion. Just like bank robbers. After all, if abortion=murder, we’d need those mechanisms in place.

Now add the kinds of protections afforded to born children: Child Protective Services would be called on a parent who took their kids into a bar to drink. Ditto for having a child hang out while the parent works dangerous tasks, such as working on an oil rig, or being a cop. A woman in this reality would be under the aegis of such a bureaucracy.

The non-birth parent would also need to be under scrutiny. What if they smoke at home? Do drugs? Abuse the birth parent in a way that might endanger the fetus? Use carbon tetrachloride to clean down a greasy bike? Keep unsecured weapons in the house?

And what of punishment, or recidivism? Can a person with a history of fetal personhood termination be allowed contact with their children? Courts have been removing children from dangerous homes for decades.

Either people have agency or not. Cognitive dissonance does not work in a legal framework. If we take away privacy, add Soviet-style snooping, and add data collection, we have created the ultimate “nanny state” in terms of privacy intrusion. We also add a huge financial burden to the economy for no economic benefit.

In a society today where fetuses are coveted no matter the mother’s religion or circumstances, but children are abandoned if they’re beyond the current safety net, we’re doing no one any good. And there, perhaps, is a good place to invest in outrage and remediation.

There’ll be an ongoing set of posts when particularly obtuse news comes out relating to the 13th Amendment.

What do you think?

Michael Chambon and Orthodox Judaism

Sol Sharp on 17 February, 2023

Austin Poet John Gibbons posted this NYTimes article about Orthodox Jews and an extension of an eruv, which lets Jews carry (anything other than clothes) on Shabbat between private (their house) and public (everywhere else) spaces.

Reminds me of my friends when I was growing up with keys made into tie clips or embedded in simple necklaces. My synagogue even had a red/green traffic signal visible so people could pass by and see if the eruv was unbroken (another tease to read the article).

John also reminded me of why I got into the Shmuley Myers series in the first place. I really loved The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which Chambon wrote in 2008. Where his book focused on the grander scale of the American Jewish community at an inflection point (no spoilers, go read the book!), I wanted something more intimate, where the Jewish component was as much a fabric of life as that of a homicide detective. And where he has Alaska as the focal point, much as Gene Roddenberry used Star Trek as a stage for human problems, I wanted something more tactile, more interacting with the physical space that Austin provides in spades. Hat tip to Michael for writing this book, and (shameless plug) check out my books in the Shmuley Myers series!

Limits of Privacy and Intrusion

Sol Sharp on 10 August, 2022

The consequences of deciding what people can do with their bodies are just starting to cascade The slippery slope of how intrusive the state governments will be is just starting to reveal itself. spoiler alert: the slope turns into a vertical wall fairly quickly.

Looks like A Question of Allegiance will be released towards the end of the year. subscribe to the mailing list for a very few emails a month.

Lurching Back to Life

Sol Sharp on 21 March, 2022

Restart with a Goal

Being an author with both a life and another full-time job makes adding the social media aspect hard. Add to that writing a series as well as working on other manuscripts, and you’ve got one overloaded human.

But I’m going to try anyway. Starting with getting a team together:

I’ve started looking for a social media person w/author management experience.
My awesome White Gold Wielders writing group sets things up for my alpha readers (for Jewish law, medical, and law enforcement double-checks) which leads into beta readers and finally a professional editor. One need only pay for one once to understand just how important they are (are you listening, Robin Seavill?).
Gudrun Jobst does page design and layout as well as the covers. And a dang great job she does of it.

This takes time and money, and having a paying job helps. And will help pay for the first bullet point, above.

I’ll have a post every week or so, with little tweaks and updates as I have the time.

Where Are We At, Again?

A Day at the Zoo is out and available on most all ebook platforms. It’s also available as a trade paperback from Amazon. It’s weird to have the occasional person ask that I sign their copy. What do I say, “hi, thanks for buying it?”

Book Two in the series, A Question of Allegiance, just went off to the editor and should be back for my edits and final cleanup in a month or so. Unlike AD@tZ, AQoA went through a more systematic editing process (all hail for learning on the job), and so I’ll need to get with Gudrun in a couple weeks to work on the next cover. I sort of outfoxed myself with the first cover as it is generic. If I could use it as the series “cover,” I would. But, alas, folks need to be able to quickly see the difference. I’ll have the blurb up shortly.

Book Three, The Property of Blood, was a very hard one to write. Authors do so ever get attached to their characters. It’s a complete draft, twice gone ’round, but now ready for alpha readers to have at it. It’s a bit longer than the second book, and might need to have some scene deletions, but, since this is being self-published instead of hewing to the ever-changing whims of the publishing industry (which seems to be imploding), I can give the readers a bit more Shmuley than otherwise dictated.

Book Four, A Measure of Mercy, about half complete, word count-wise. Which {sigh} means it’s probably only a quarter of the way done. I did more planning for this book, since as the number of books in the series gets longer, there’s more “Did Shmuley ever this place?” “How does Jethro get involved in the story line early on?” “And what about Erian???” As usual for the series, I’ve got a good view of most of the key events, but not wrapping up the loose threads into a knot — I’m not done making all the threads yet!

Closing in on Launch!

Sol Sharp on 10 July, 2021

Pagesetting is complete. Gudrun, who did the book’s cover, did the internal layout as well. ; here’s a sample from the beginning of the book:

The walking man icon is taken from the cover, and appears at the top of each chapter. I’m a bit worried about the Hebrew-esque font for chapter and scene headings, but I’ve been assured that it’s perfectly readable by those who don’t know the language.

Cover Reveal

Sol Sharp on 3 July, 2021

The cover’s done. It was an interesting evolution. If you’re looking for plot or characters, this isn’t the post for you. It hopefully shows the evolution of a cover from simplistic ideas to a finished, professional product.

I learned a lot, most importantly that while I’ve got some very small graphics skills, and initially was going to create my own, there’s nothing like having a professional. Here was my first swag, a mishmash of visual ideas, just to generate ideas.

Many collective groans came of this (folks, it was not supposed to be a real cover!), so I signed Gudrun up to make sense of this, and she came up with a few thoughts based on it:

For a European artist to do the research on creating an Austin skyline impressed the heck out of me. More on that later. While the badge shape with the Start of David was more on the nose than Gudrun realized, it was too prominent. Also, the tiger’s important, but only at the beginning of this crazy romp.

Busy, Great colors, nice background of Austin (still) and good font set. Shmuley was still too frum (religious)-looking, and I was concerned about using an actual person’s face.

Even busiererer. Pumped up the married part (he is, it’s important, but…just no, for the cover). I did like the walking man. Progress, moving forward… Time for another round.

It had a lot of things I wanted, except Shmuley’s hats & coat weren’t accurate to his religious affiliation. We closed on the fonts. Then we looked at the entire jacket:

I wanted the spine to be clearer, but, more importantly, this novel takes place in an alternate history, so I needed to remove the newer buildings, and add a chunk of tenements. So I sent off this:

Gudrun’s freaking magical:

So here we are: a cover that’ll not just be good for A Day at the Zoo, but be the basis for follow-on books in the series.

Oh, the joys of copyediting

Sol Sharp on 28 June, 2021

A Day at the Zoo is a thriller, with the added fillip of having a narrator who in inside-out English speaks because any which way you can make a sentence in Yiddish.

Initial versions were so densely twisted that it impacted its readability for some early readers. I made edits, then more edits. And, finally, realized that I needed professional help (aside from the psychological variety). I engaged with Robin, an editor in England, to give the manuscript a crisp shaking out and cleaning.

Robin’s not Jewish, nor someone who’s familiar with, as my readers call it, Shmuley-speak. But he read a snippet, and took it on anyway. The joy of a good editor is how they do when presented with strange words and contexts. Here’s a bit from an email from him:

The word shabbes appears regularly with that spelling, in italics, and not capitalised. (Sometimes it has a capital, but I’m tempted to retain the lower case because that seems to be the majority default rendering.) What, then, is Shabbat, which presumably means the same thing, but has a different ending and a capital? I can’t imagine it’s all that difference as a concept, but what would you prefer? Leave the discrepancy aziz, or render Jewish sabbath and Shabbat consistently as shabbes? (Such things get noticed – Chapter 2/19 is actually called Shabbat, but the first word in the text is Shabbes.
Elsewhere I am trying to make sensible decisions as to what to capitalise and what, not. Generally, if a word is familiar enough to Western ears I leave it in roman (eg bar mitzvah). If it is less part of the mainstream, I retain the foreignness in italics (eg, goyim). BTW, I thoroughly agree with your practice of immediately providing a translation of each new term as it occurs. Our narrator is steeped in his own culture and history, but he doesn’t want to estrange anyone. This is a neat and economical way of indicating that character trait.
Meanwhile the intrigue continues. Who would want to poison a tiger? And why was this particular woman the victim? And what a dangerous game Shmuley is playing with the fugitives. There’s a lot going on and it’s all moving forwards nicely. But do let me know about the shabbes thing.

So… fun times for me. I had final say, and it was quite the process going through all the nits as well as the larger issues. Authors editing their own manuscripts only gets someone so far. Robin’s been awesome, and hopefully he’ll be able to take on the coming manuscripts from the series.